It is not a problem of incompatibility of account definitons among different devices, i.e., MBP and iPhone, I guess. Because, in my case iPhone (before sync) only helps me to reaffirm that there were the messages really, and then, when it syncs with the Yahoo server, the messages are deleted from it, too. Because, they are deleted from the server by Mail.

But, just to answer you, the account was defined as IMAP in Mail and was setup through the a built-in Yahoo! account options in iPhone (I guess we can call it IMAP, too).

I'm ready to provide all the setup info, if ever someone from Apple asks, which I doubt.

I have three iMap and one Exchange account. I have noticed the issue on Both the iMap and Exchange accounts.

You can receive an e-mail on your iPhone, walk to your Mac to see it magically dissapear. Not to be too negative, but I am pretty sure it is an Apple problem because of the following reasons (as earlier decribed in this thread BTW)

1: Mail dissapears from view in the Mail client, but is not deleted or moved(see point 2). You can be looking at it and without doing anything it dissapears from the mailbox.

2: I found this out as running an archiver such as MailSteward on the affected MAC system(we own 6) , it perfectly retrieves the missing mail pieces and puts the into the Mail Database (All details inclusive of attachments)

3: Even so, there is no way in the world to show them in the Lion mail client. (Not in any of the Boxes/folders what have you, search does not yield it in the results)

4: The number of people with this problem is big every other day there is another Ditto/Me too

5:The views of this topic is over 5500 - At least something is going on

6: This type of issue is a recurring one, and noticed between upgrades of the various Mac OSX releases over hte last couple of years.

So I am sorry, being in development and dev/management for years I would say there is reasonable suspicion Mail/OSX is not quite stable in this area.

What you describe in point #1 is typical when an action on another computer or device has Moved a message from the Inbox or other folder to local folder -- the next acess sees it briefly before syncing.

If you have Mail Steward, Rules or anything on some one computer moving messages, they will be removed from the Server since the Inbox of any IMAP or Exchange Account resides on the server, exclusively, and any device syncs to the server. It the same effect as deleting the message.

If archiving via something like Mail Steward, the action should be a Copy and NOT a Move.

I agree with your assessment that my/other computers could move the message if there are rules set-up to do so. I have none but OK.

However this is not the case here. MailSteward does not delete or move, it just retrieves data from LOCAL files on the Mac file system it does not sync with servers, and in my case it only retrieves inbox and sent from the Mac Mail-files. You can see this even when the system is disconnected from the network.

A mail not appearing in the inbox on Mac Mail appears in the inbox of the MailStward system upon archiving AFTER you found out it seems to be missing from Lion Mail. The source of the mails are the same i.e. local mail storage files. Figure me that.

I do no know how to convice you that Apple is not infallable, particularly in the area of systems software, but mails just dissapear fromm threads for no apparent reason. BTW, It also concerns mail on my .me now iCloud system (Aple stuff), Mac Osx Lion (Apple stuff), an Mac Mail clinet (Apple stuff) I need a 3rd party product (MailSteward) to get my mail back. Mails even dissapear from the middle of threads! and can only be retrieved from the system with MS.

Each IMAP and Exchange account has local folders that are only temporary copies of what is on the server -- they are not permanent, but awaits the next syncing. If Mail Steward copies from that to some archive, then fine. But if it moves the message from that "local folder" it will impact the server -- that is how IMAP/Exchange works. Removing the message from the local folder/cache of any IMAP account will cause removal from the server.

I am not missing the point on what you think is happening, but only trying to help you diagnose the issue. The fact that you initially see the message before it disappears means nothing by itself. If it were me, I would turn off Mail Steward and test for a time.

Again I understand your response, and do not want to be flippant but please assume there is a decent brain at this side with 20+ years of Unix and 8+ years of OSX experience that does not realy require a poke to think. MS was and is the solution/workaround to retrieve important information after the loss-event. And is unfortunately required to augment a consumer mail-product that has gone haywire, it is not the problem, and it does not change anything in the ~library/MAIL files it just dumps the content in a database for archival and better search features.

For me, a month's worth of my IMAP emails had suddenlu gone missing. After much review, I discovered an old POP account that was still active on an rarely used laptop. The account preferences on the POP account were set to delete emails from the server that were more than a week old.

When I went into the account to deactivate the old POP accounts (Thus ensuring I didn't lose any more emails), I was able to find all of the missing emails in these POP accounts, and was able ot recover them. Whew!

IMAP is lovely for syncing my acounts on multiple systems, but watch your old POPs.

I, too, developed problems with some IMAP emails not appearing in the AppleMail Inbox, or appearing for an instant and then disappearing. This problem appeared after updating my phone to OS 5 and my computer to Lion, effectively disabling MobileMe. I configured both systems to utilize iCloud.

The email problem would start fresh each day, while emails from the prior day were newly visible. I discovered that when I shut off my iPhone, the missing emails appeared in AppleMail. It seems that my iPhone was preempting receipt of emails and preventing them from appearing in AppleMail.

My issue seems to be resolved now. The only thing I changed on my phone was to delete all references to MobileMe. If you try a similar test and fix, be sure to turn off all devices retrieving email: phones, pads, etc. and see if that has any impact on receiving in AppleMail. It turns out that despite the extensive trouble shooting provided by Apple tech support, we were troubling shooting the wrong device.

I wish Apple would admit that there is a problem here. I have many emails missing. They're in Time Machine but I have to manually find each one. This is simply unacceptable behaviour - you can't have Mail.app just randomly delete emails!! I've missed some *very* important emails because of this. It shouldn't be a MobileMe/iCloud issue because this is happening with IMAP Yahoo Mail for me.

In my case, quitting the Mail app and immediately relaunching it restores the missing emails, plus the ones that never showed up to begin with. Are your mail messages completely gone/deleted and only recoverable through Time Machine?

More Like This

Incoming Links

This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.
Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums.
Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site. All postings and use of the content on this site are subject to the Apple Support Communities Terms of Use.